SCENE ONE
The Marvel logo fades and the screen fades to black… A gloved hand rises slowly and knocks; we realize the black screen has actually become a black front door.
Daniela:
(Her voice comes from beyond the door)
Just a minute.
Brief establishing shot reveals a colonial style home, white picket fence, snow in the yard, and Christmas lights nestled in a nice neighborhood of similar homes. It’s a lovely piece of suburbia overall. A lone figure is standing on the small front stoop as the light comes on in the foyer and then the porch light. The figure is in a long dark dress coat. The door opens and we see the figure of a blond woman in a house coat.
Cut to close up of the woman, mid thirties blond hair pulled into a pony tail, very pretty all American look about her, the prom queen all grown up.
Daniela:
(Looking up somewhat confused at the large man at her door.)
Yes?
Frank:
Daniela Wilkinson?
Daniela:
Yes, who are you?
Frank:
I’m here for you and your husband. I’ve seen the eight millimeter films you and he have been producing… with your children.
(Frank’s voice nearly hisses the last part.)
Daniela:
(Shame and shock flash across her face as her eyes water and her hand covers her mouth)
Oh… Oh, my God. Oh, God.
David Wilkinson (Another all American high school QB type) appears at the door now, after coming down the stairs. He is in his night clothes and just as surprised at the sudden appearance of their evening visitor.
David:
Danni? Who is it, honey?
(Upon seeing his wife. He looks to her then cuts his eyes to the tall man at the door)
What’s the matter? What the hell do you want?
Daniela:
He’s here about the tapes, David. He’s seen the tapes.
David:
Oh, God. Look, we… we…
Frank:
Shut up. Get your children and bring them downstairs… now.
Run and I’ll hunt you down. Got it?
Cut to the living room where sits the three children on the couch. Frank looms in the corner watching as the mother kisses them. The father stands near-by his eyes darting from Frank to the children and back to the door. Frank catches his glance and shakes his head ominously.
Frank:
Social services have been alerted and will be here soon. I need you both in the basement. Show me your fun room.
Cut to the darkened basement. The light flicks on as the couple’s legs come down the stairs with Frank lumbering behind. The basement is well lit and painted in bright colors. There is a bed with children’s sheets and sex toys strewn about. The walls off camera are lined with costumes for the children and their parents.
Daniela:
Please don’t let our kids see us in handcuffs. There is a door to the yard over there. You can take us into custody and to the squad car through there? Please don’t…
Frank:
I’m not a cop. You’re not going anywhere.
David:
Who the hell are you?
Frank unbuttons his overcoat for the first time to reveal the hastily painted skull on his bullet proof vest. He then pulls a custom Colt 1911-A1 .45 caliber handgun from his shoulder holster. From his coat pocket he removes a silencer which he begins to screw onto the pistol’s extended barrel.
The couple begins to panic.
Frank:
Quiet! Think of the children. Do something for them for once.
(Speaking over each other.)
David:
Please! You don’t have to do this.
Daniela:
How did you find us? Why are you doing this?
Frank:
The hell I don’t. I came across one of your tapes from a smut peddler in Bensonhurst last summer. You (pointing to the father) and your oldest son, dressed up like a priest and an altar boy. Other tapes showed you (pointing to Daniela) and both your sons. Others with the little girl. I spent the next six months tracking you down; from the street peddler to the supplier, to the distributor, Jerry. I got to him about two hours ago. His body is laid out on a dumpster in a lower east side alley. He was the one that pointed me to Staten Island, to you.
David:
So what? You [frick]ing shoot us in our own home.
Frank:
Yes.
Frank shoots Daniela in the forehead. She drops like a rag doll. Before David can react, Frank shoots him in the neck just below the chin severing his spine. David slumps to the floor. Gasping like a fish out of water, he is paralyzed from the neck down. He cannot scream. He cannot move. He lies there; his eyes darting about for some form of help. There is only Frank Castle staring down at him. He creaks out a death rattle as blood from his wound finally fills his lungs and gushes from his mouth and nose. After a few more blinks his eyes go blank and pupils dilate. Frank walks upstairs flicking off the light before he closes the door. He turns and locks it, breaking the key off in the knob. Frank emerges from the kitchen the children are still sitting on the couch.
Daughter:
Where’s mama?
Frank:
Downstairs. The police will be here in a minute. When they get here tell them your mother is down there. Give them these. (He hands her a bundle of video tapes and some 8mm film reels.) Until then your mom wants you to stay on the couch. Got it?
Daughter:
Yes, sir.
(Frank’s Voice Over from his War Journal, [PWJ:])
The little girl may be young enough yet to forget most of this shit, what her parents a have done, what I’ve done. The boys…
Close up on Frank from the outside of the front door looking in over his shoulder. Frank looks at the children the boys especially. They are almost robotic staring blankly at the TV, one of them finally looks at him briefly only to refocus his gaze back to the screen.
PWJ:
The boys; I have a feeling I may be seeing them again in twenty years or so.
Frank closes the front door bringing the screen back to black in the close up.
{Music: The chimes if AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells begins with the closed door. The song plays throughout titles and opening montage.}
Titles: PUNISHER: DEAD MAN’S PARTY fades in as the death’s head emerges from the black field behind, the death’s head then fades from white to transparent with an overhead of Times Square as it approaches camera, the color comes in full as the death’s head leaves the margins off screen .
SCENE TWO: OPENING MONTAGE/CREDITS
We see the view of Times Square from above. The old ball and the year 1985 are clearly evident, to set the date for the audience. Thousands pack the streets. The camera pans away to the south, moving over lower Manhattan between the towers of World Trade Tower One and Two, and hooking east over the Brooklyn Bridge
The sound of merriment fades as we cross over the city replaced by the sounds of cars and voices increasingly raised in anger. Screams and gunshots, threats and crying become louder behind the monotone of Frank’s narration. The camera sweeps lower into the streets as we pass the Navy Yard and Interstate 278. We see the desolation that is mid eighties Brooklyn.
Camera’s pan continues into the alley ways and through dingy tenements and broken down crack houses we see addicts and human wreckage. We see beatings and muggings and junkies freebasing and sick. Finally as we pass through a ruined building we see a skeletally thin woman taking a hit from a crack pipe as a child nurses from her lank breast. The long pan continues out the window and down into the alley. We travel slowly up the darkened claustrophobic space, over garbage cans and rats toward the flashing red and white lights at the alley’s end.
SCENE THREE:
There against the stark brightness stands a figure leaning against the wall looking out of the shadows the flashing lights dancing across his face. He is tall and fit, in his mid thirties, his face is worn and scared. His keen eyes stare across the street at police cruisers and ambulances parked in front of a corner store. A body bag is being wheeled to the coroner’s van as the last ambulance pulls away, unneeded.
Voice Over: PWJ
Punisher War Journal Monday, December 31, 1984.
Crack hit the streets like wildfire forcing out heroin as the drug of choice for the poor and the blood suckers that live in their midst. Not the first new drug to come down the pipe, but when you couple something this addictive with a high that only lasts a couple of hours compared to heroin’s all day vegetative state, it means they’re a lot more hurting junkies looking for whatever money they can beg, steal, and kill for to get the next hit. Within six months this place became a war zone. The homicide rate in the ghettos and projects shot up two hundred and thirty percent. “Crackheads,” they call them. Fidgety, paranoid little [frick]ers. Unpredictable hollow eyed junkies, starved to the bone to feed an itch that only gets scratched with freshly burnt lips and raspy breaths through a dingy glass pipe.
I knew Tariq Al Kessani, as much as I allow myself to know anyone. Iranian, moved here after the revolution with his family, used to be the family doctor for a distant relative of the Shah which was enough to mark him for death under the new theocracy. Couldn’t get a medical license here, but ran a little clinic, off the books, from the back of his store. He patched me up a few times over the last few years. I came back to the city torn up by fever and septicemia after two nights neglecting my wounds in the woods waiting for Nicky Cavella to die. I passed out in the store trying to stock up the new safe house. I woke up a few hours later in the clinic hooked up to an I.V. antibiotic drip. His wife, Yathmina, was changing my dressings. We had an arrangement, I kept the thugs and pushers away from the shop and slipped him some cash under the table; he kept his mouth shut and helped me out when I needed it. He called it his “community service.”
Now all I can do is watch them wheel out what’s left of Tariq, Yathmina, and their three children in bags.
This is why I don’t like to leave my hunting grounds.
Frank watches as a single figure lifts the police lines and heads casually across the street. The man lights a cigarette and Frank taps a trash can near his hand. The man walks over to the mouth of the alley and stands there keeping his back to Frank appearing to watch the crime scene from a distance as if to take it all in. He is a rather diminutive looking man, slightly disheveled in a wrinkled trench coat and scruffy dark hair. He is Detective Sergeant Martin Soap, head of the Punisher Task Force.
Frank:
All of them?
Soap:
Yeah. I came down when I heard. Thief came in as the dad was closing up shop. Family was in the back. They lived back there, I guess. Guy must’ve held a gun on Kessani while he emptied the register, wife came out, startled him. He pops the dad in the head. Shoots mom twice at the door to the back rooms. Oldest son, the fourteen year old, comes out of the back with a base ball bat. Guy shoots him at least three times. Takes the bat and bashes at the register ‘till it opens. Looks like he tugged out the little safe under the counter couldn’t get in that so he rolled the bodies for spare change. Headed to the back and raided the medicine cabinets in the clinic. Found the Nine year old and the four year old hiding under the exam table. Looks like the boy might have stuck him with a scalpel. Guy beat the kids to death something unmerciful. He ransacks the apartment. Forgot to lock the shop’s door so some drunk comes in for booze and finds the dad, makes a commotion and the bad guy breaks out the back door. Only one set of shoe prints in the blood, so it looks like a single shooter.
Frank:
Blood trail out back from his wound?
Soap:
Yeah, thinned out at the dumpster. Must’ve grabbed a tourniquet or somethin’ there. Broke north on the next block over. You can follow it easy.
Frank:
Not a bad detective when you need to be, are you Soap?
Soap:
I did earn the detective shield somehow, you know. Find this [frick]. He earned what’s coming.
Frank:
Don’t we all?
Soap:
Some more than most. Have fun, Frank.
Soap walks back across the street waving to the only cop looking in his direction for a light. Frank uses the distraction to slip onto the street unnoticed. He casually walks to the next corner and heads north. Once out of sight he slips his hand into his coat and withdraws his Colt 1911, checking the chamber, he slides the weapon back into the holster and flips up his collar and stuffs his hands in his pockets. He walks up the street somewhat unsteadily appearing drunk. Head down against the cold he uses the staggering walk as a means to hug the wall, stopping every so often to balance himself while looking for blood along the side walk.
After a few blocks the trail leads to a worn out tenement building. Two men loiter on the stoop. Frank stumbles into an alley, using the shadows to watch the front door. He wipes his thumb along the wall above a bum’s fire whipping a path through the soot. He then rubs the soot under his eyes making them seem hollow and making his eyes red and irritated. A quick dip into the trash gives him a gummy rotted carton of Chinese food; he rubs the grease from this into his hair and face. He removes his coat revealing a double shoulder holster containing a MAC 10 and 1911 Colt and ammo along with a K-Bar mounted blade up on his left breast. He takes the army field jacket from a passed out bum and tosses his own coat over the man. He then walks back onto the street toward the door.
Doorman:
Whatcho’want white boy?
Frank:
Horse.
Doorman 2:
H? Shit. You don’t use no black, mother[frick]er. You look like a [frick]in’ narc. [frick] off.
Frank:
This look like a narc to you, asshole? (He pulls up his sleeve showing track marks, his left forearm is scared and his veins are marred with swollen pin pricks and infected sores.)
You got it or not?
Doorman:
Second floor.
PWJ:
Marking myself up like a junkie always comes in handy.
Frank makes his way into the building. There are junkies laying around the hallways. Frank looks down trying to trace the blood trail. He sees more near the stairs. He moves slowly. Blood on the railing. Second floor, heroin addicts stare back at him.
PWJ:
I feel like I’m in a department store. Pot heads on the first floor, second floor heroin and morphine junkies, easy to pick out by their gray teeth and tracks. Looks like my boy went to three. I can smell the free base from here.
Frank makes his way up the stairs listening to voices coming from the next floor. He reaches the landing and sees a few men haggling over a portable TV’s value in rock. Frank sees the blood leads passed the men and down a dingy hallway. He progresses slowly. Junkies sit about the empty rooms on the floor. The doors of each apartment were removed from their hinges. Frank scans for his target amongst the human wreckage laying and squatting amongst the filth and excrement on the bare floors. Something catches his eye; fresh blood on the floor. A small pool forming around the leg of a crackhead sitting on the floor in the corner of the third apartment on the left, the man is spattered with gore and has apparently pissed himself. A small scalpel still protrudes from the side of his right knee; a pair of women’s pantyhose is tied tightly around his thigh above the wound. Frank casually leans down beside an unconscious crackhead at his feet and steals a baggy of rock from the man’s limp hand. Frank walks over to the semi-conscious wounded man. The man head lulls to look at him before exhaling a fresh hit from his filthy pipe. Franks squats down in front of him.
Frank:
Where you been?
Thief:
[frick] you. Get your own shit.
Frank looks around the room. The other crack heads are milling about, arguing, jittering as the brief high wears off, greedily puffing their pipes or slumped uselessly, at least one is dead on his side in a pool of piss and vomit.
Frank:
(Very quietly.)
I got some good shit. Something new. Come with me and I’ll give you a taste.
Thief:
Better than the rock?
Frank:
The rock would suck a dick to get this.
Thief:
I ain’t suckin’ yer dick.
Frank:
Not asking you to.
Thief:
All right, mother[frick]er. Let’s see what you got.
The men emerge through the roof access and into the cold night air. Frank helps the man along as he limps.
Frank:
Here.
Frank hands the man a rock. He looks it over suspiciously before he begins to smoke it in his pipe.
Thief:
It’s good, not kicking my ass, but I ain’t bitchin’ ‘bout free iron.
Frank smiles and then grabs the man by the back of the head and shoves the scalding crack pipe into his mouth with his other hand. He clamps the man’s jaw shut with the same hand. The man screams in pain through his closed lips. He begins thrashing. Frank quickly lets his mouth open for a split second as the man tries to spit out the pipe Frank slams his forearm and elbow into the junkie’s jaw catching the glass pipe between his teeth, shattering it in the killer’s mouth. Frank twists the man into a choke hold. Moving the hand from behind his head and using it to pinch the still struggling man’s nose shut and cover his mouth his grip is so tight we can hear his leather glove creaking with stain. Every movement as the man thrashes brings the sound of broken glass crunching. Tears are running down the man’s contorted face. Frank leans in close to the man’s ear speaking calmly and quietly, his eyes, icy, almost blank staring straight ahead over the panicking man's shoulder.
Frank:
Swallow. Swallow it.
Frantic the man complies. He shrieks through the hand clasped over his mouth instantly retching. Frank messages his throat roughly.
Frank:
Swallow.
The man swallows again. Retching harder the man vomits blood and sick through Frank’s gloved fingers. Frank lets the man fall to the roof’s tarred surface. He vomits blood and glass fragments. Frank stares down at him and then glances around the roof. He walks over to a small cistern and pulls free an old rusted iron pipe. The thief tries to crawl for the door.
Frank:
C’mere.
Castle grabs the junkie by the ankle and drags him to the open central portion of the roof. He swings the two foot length of pipe savagely beating the man for several seconds; the sounds progress from sharp metal clanks, to sickening cracks and pops, finally devolving to wet smacks.
Frank drops the bloody pipe on the man’s body. He opens his jacket revealing his bullet resistant vest emblazoned with a roughly painted death’s head. He pulls his Ingram MAC 10 and then heads downstairs. He walks up to the men still haggling over the TV to rock exchange rate. He shoves the two men with the TV aside and levels the machine pistol at the seated drug pusher. The man looks up in terror.
Frank:
Whose operation is this?
Pusher:
Shit! Wha? I-Wha?
Frank:
Whose shit is this?!
Pusher:
T-Toomey. John James Toomey.
Frank:
Good, here’s a message you can give him for me.
Frank shoots the man point blank in the face with a full auto burst spattering the wall behind him in pink mist, brain fragments, and bullet holes.
A second dealer emerges from the only room with a door on the hinges. Frank pulls a .45 and shots him in the head from five yards away. He then slams home a fresh magazine into the MAC and works the bolt. He heads for the open door. A woman rushes to close the door from inside the room Frank lets a burst fly from the MAC shooting her through the wood door. He walks briskly into the counting room; at its center is a table with several thousand dollars and walls lined with bartered merchandise. Frank sprays two counters as they flee, hitting each repeatedly in the back. He grabs a trash bag and quickly stuffs the cash inside it, his eyes never leaving the door.
He hears the sound of running footsteps coming up the stairs. The first of the door men bursts in Frank sprays him with the Ingram. Frank hears the second man take cover against the wall near the door frame. He tosses the bag over his shoulder then side steps to the corner of the room where a sawed off Ithaca 37 sits idle. He allows the MAC to hang loose on its lanyard and scoops up the 12 gauge.
He quietly walks to the door then kicks it closed the man on the other side of the wall lets out a panicked yelp. Frank zeros the shotgun at chest level to the right of the door approximating the man’s position and then opens fire blasting through the wall with several rounds of buckshot. Upon hearing the doorman fall, Frank opens the door, crouching low and using the doorframe for cover. He fires a final shell into the wounded thug from three feet away causing a spray of gore to splash the wall, before drawing his MAC-10 again.
He makes his way down the steps and out of the building without further incident. Upon reaching the street he ducks back into the alley and tosses the bum his jacket back and retrieves his over coat, never waking the sleeping transient. He stuffs a small wad of bills into the man’s pocket. Castle buttons up his coat to cover the death’s head and fills his pockets with cash from the bag before discarding it in the dumpster. He uses a handkerchief to wipe some of the grime off his face and flattens his hair before resuming his drunken walk back down the block toward the Kassani’s store. As he reaches the block beyond the cordoned off shop front several police units roar down the block in the direction of the crack house. Frank walks another block before reaching his safe house. He inserts the key and slips his arm inside to disable the grenade tied to the door handle before darting in.
The safe house consists of a fairly large basement apartment. Frank slides a large bookshelf aside revealing a nook lined with weapons and a workbench lined with gun smithing tools and other equipment. He makes his way around the apartment placing his weapons into similar hidden alcoves.
Finally Frank wanders into his kitchenette and retrieves his customary carton of orange juice. He turns on the television and sits down in an easy chair just in time to see the ball drop in Times Square.
Frank:
Happy [frick]in’ New Year.